Supreme Court to hear case on anonymous tips

Published 5:59 pm, Tuesday, October 1, 2013

The U.S. Supreme Court granted review of a Northern California drug-transportation case Tuesday to decide whether police can stop a car based solely on an anonymous tip of reckless driving.

Under constitutional standards for searches and seizures, officers can detain a driver if they have reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, and can rely on an identified witness' description of illegal activity that endangers the public. But courts around the nation have disagreed on whether police can pull someone over because an anonymous source reported that the motorist was driving dangerously.

The high court agreed to hold a hearing and decide the issue in the term that ends in June.

The case dates from August 2008, when a Highway Patrol dispatcher got a call from someone who had been run off the road by a pickup truck on Highway 1 north of Fort Bragg. The caller provided the license number, and shortly afterward two CHP officers spotted and stopped the pickup.

The officers smelled marijuana when they approached, and found four bags of the drug in the truck bed, according to a state appeals court. After unsuccessfully challenging the search, the driver and passenger, brothers Lorenzo and Jose Navarette, pleaded guilty to transporting marijuana and were sentenced to 90 days in jail.

The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco upheld their convictions in October 2012, citing a 2006 California Supreme Court ruling that allowed police to rely on an anonymous tip without actually seeing the motorist driving recklessly.

"The report that the (Navarettes') vehicle had run someone off the road sufficiently demonstrated an ongoing danger to other motorists to justify the stop without direct corroboration of the vehicle's illegal activity," the appellate panel said in a 3-0 ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court last addressed the issue in 2000, when it ruled unanimously that an anonymous tip that a man had been seen at a bus stop with a gun did not entitle police to search someone who matched the informant's description. The justices said unidentified informants may be unreliable or even malicious, but added that the conclusion might be different if the tip had concerned a bomb or a sensitive setting like an airport.

Since then, courts in some states, including California, have upheld vehicle stops based on anonymous tips, using the rationale that "a drunk driver is like a bomb," said Paul Kleven, the Navarettes' lawyer.

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